FlipIt USB charger sandwiches itself between an AC cord and the socket

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

More and more gadgets these days charge from USB instead of AC sockets, which is convenient for road warriors but not so convenient for people with a limited number of USB ports in their desktops and laptops. It’s not a problem springing for a USB AC adapter, of course: they’re cheap enough these days. The problem is that once you buy one, it takes up a perfectly good AC slot that some other gadget could be using.

Enter FlipIt, a rather clever way of using a standard United States AC socket for both juicing your television and juicing your phone at the same time.

The idea is ingenious: the FlipIt is a little USB charging arm that is sandwiched between the prongs of your power cord and the AC socket itself. This allows you to not only juice a USB gadget, but also keep sending power to a more traditional piece of home electronics.

The connections are hidden in the blue rotating arm sandwiched between both; output is a modest 5V/750mA, which should be enough to juice up most gadgets. The design only works for North America at the moment, but there shouldn’t be any reason it wouldn’t work for other locations if they update the prong system.